By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
This revision page reduces the high-wire scene to its most forceful motions: fixing, tightening, turning, looking, and becoming the top itself.
Because the page is handwritten and compressed, it reads like a stripped working draft of the larger wire poem. The physical verbs dominate, and the closing inversion, being underneath and then being the top, gives the worker an almost mystical identification with the task.
Short drill of the process: tightening, resining, turning the wheel taut, peripheral for no sag no bow. He was underneath, beneath the top, he was the top.